Should we forgive Lance Armstrong?

In the past couple months Lance Armstrong went from being recognized as the world’s best athlete to the biggest fraud in sporting history. Nike dumped him. Oakley gave him the boot. He was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and kicked out of the sport of cycling. Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) said that Armstrong “deserves to be forgotten!”

And my husband said, “Lance is like a Bernie Madoff with an exercise obsession.”

When USADA released over 200 pages of material last fall proving beyond doubt that Lance Armstrong was a cheater and a liar, I started talking about the scandal with my kids. I wrote in a previous SFGate blog post:

There’s a great lesson (for kids) in Mr. Armstrong’s story of deceit. As parents we try to teach our children the consequences of cheating and lying and we often find ourselves providing lame, unconvincing examples. “If you steal a cookie from the cookie jar and your mom catches you…well…then…”

Here was an epic story of deception. Here was a guy who obtained great fame and fortune, but because he was dishonest, his kingdom came tumbling down.

In today’s intense parenting culture, kids are expected and encouraged to excel. There’s no room for average anymore. The last generation of parents told kids that they needed to go to college. This generation tells them that they need to go to Stanford or get a lacrosse scholarship to Duke. Our focus on success sometimes drives the most talented and brightest kids to copy their friends’ homework, buy term papers online, cheat on the SATs, bully their teammates, take steroids. Armstrong’s story can teach kids that it’s not worth breaking the rules because even though it might seem at the time like you’ll never get caught, eventually your bad deeds catch up to you. You can go from the best in the world to the worst in a matter of days—and that’s not cool.

Now the Lance Armstrong story is continuing and taking an unexpected turn. Many thought that this guy who deceived the world for so many years and ruined the careers of many fellow athletes to achieve his own fame would never ever in a million years soften and fess up. But tonight in a pre-taped, tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong will be admitting to taking performance-enhancing drugs—and we’re all sitting on the edges of our seats to find out what else he’ll be revealing. Afterward we’ll all be asking, Should we forgive him?

At the dinner table the other night, I posed this question to my family.

My husband, a cycling enthusiast who’s passionate about the sport, shared, “I’m never forgiving him. The guy ruined the sport.”

“I forgive him, Mommy,” my son said with a smile.

“No way!” was my daughter’s gut reaction.

“But at school you’re taught to forgive your schoolmates,” I pointed out to my daughter. “How would you be asked to approach this situation at school? Would you forgive him on the school playground?”

“Mom, it’s not like he stole a ball from someone on the playground. What he did was like really really bad!”

“And don’t forget how he treated Sheryl Crow,” my husband said.

“What about restorative practices?” I asked. At my children’s school they use a technique called restorative practices to build relationships, resolve conflict and maintain a peaceful atmosphere among students.

“Mom, he needs to have a circle,” my almost-10-year-old daughter said.

“What?”

“He needs to sit down with the people he was bad to and talk to them. Make things better.” (In the official Restorative Practices materials, this is called “restoring the relationship.”)

“Well, he’s going to talk on television…” (even though I agreed with where they were taking the conversation I wanted to push them to more clearly communicate their idea)

“He needs to sit down with these people like that Tyler person you read the book about. Wasn’t he mean to him or something?”

“You mean face-to-face.”

“Yes!”

And then my son chimed in, “He could pick up litter or something.” (Restorative Practices calls for wrongdoers to do community service. At my kids school, it’s not uncommon to see students picking up litter at recess. The thinking is that it’s better for punished kids to be actively making the world a better place rather than sitting in the office doing nothing.)

“Mom, do we get to watch Oprah?”

“It’s on too late.”

“Awww…no fair!”

And so there you have an elementary school take on how Lance can find redemption. He needs to have face-to-face conversations with all the people he hurt and anyone who has followed this story knows that’s a ton of people—and the Oprah Winfrey interview doesn’t count. Oh, and he needs to pick up a lot of litter.

These actually aren’t bad ideas. How about putting Lance in an orange vest and making him walk the Tour de France route this summer to pick up all the fans’ trash.

Do you think we should forgive Lance?

Tune in: Tomorrow at 3 p.m. on KGO Channel 7, SFGate parenting blogger Amy Graff will be discussing how to talk to your kids about the Lance Armstrong scandal with Katie Couric on ABC’s Katie show.